The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has strained the world's healthcare systems and compounded challenges for governments and NGOs dealing with global waves of forced and voluntary migration. These movements of peoples across borders have magnified pressing issues ranging from social and economic inequalities and global climate change to civil war and political unrest. In the United States and worldwide, how can we promote the best public health outcomes while working to protect human rights, manage resources, and address inequality?

With a focus on the intersection of mobility, human rights, and public health, the Einaudi Center's Lund Critical Debate this year brings together one of the world's leading public health policymakers at the World Health Organization with a United States Senator and Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who led the Senate's efforts to study the consequences of global forced migration. The event will examine the geopolitical dimensions, the epidemiological aspects, and the humanitarian issues of this critical topic. The debate will illuminate key issues surrounding public health, migration, and racial and social justice at stake globally and nationally.

We welcome questions during the event. Registration is required.

Panelists

Dr. Zsuzsanna Jakab serves as Deputy Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations agency dedicated to promoting public health and responsible for responding to health emergencies. Prior to her current appointment, Dr. Jakab has held several high-profile national and international public health policy positions: as WHO Regional Director for the European Region (2010-2019); as Founding Director of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (2005-2010); and as State Secretary at the Hungarian Ministry of Health, Social, and Family Affairs (2002-2005), where she managed the country’s preparations for European Union accession in the area of public health.

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ). The son of Cuban immigrants, Sen. Menendez has represented the state of New Jersey in the United States Senate since 2006. As Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he has established himself as a foreign policy leader, seeking to do globally what he has done in New Jersey—supporting the most vulnerable in our society and lending a voice to those least able to speak for themselves. In June 2020, under his leadership, the committee published the report, "Global Forced Migration: The Political Crisis of Our Time." He helped pass the Senate's COVID relief packages and other healthcare legislation as well as playing a key role in shaping immigration reform bills. Prior to his position in the Senate, he served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1993-2006.

Moderator

Dr. Gunisha Kaur is an assistant professor of anesthesiology who specializes in human rights research. Dr. Kaur serves as the Founding Director of the Human Rights Impact Lab, a Medical Director of the Weill Cornell Center for Human Rights, and a Faculty Fellow at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, where she co-leads the migrations research team. Dr. Kaur’s research interests focus on advancing the health of displaced populations such as migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. She has used her extensive training and research in neuroscience as an analytical framework to pioneer the study of human rights through scientific methodology. Her research is currently funded by the National Institutes of Health. A foremost leader in scientific investigations into migrant health, Dr. Kaur was selected as a member of the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Honor Society and as a Stephen M. Kellen Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations. She earned her B.S. from Cornell University in 2006, M.D. from Weill Cornell Medical College in 2010, and her M.A. in medical anthropology from Harvard University in 2015.

About the Debate
This year's Lund Critical Debate is hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and co-sponsored by Migrations: A Global Grand Challenge and in partnership with the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs, with production assistance from eCornell. Established in 2008, Einaudi's Lund Critical Debate Series is made possible by the generosity of Judith Lund Biggs ’57.

Talk by Anna Stirr

Gokul Joshi (1930-1961) was a radical progressive poet and singer who was born in poverty and lived an itinerant life in Nepal and India in the 1940s and 50s, performing his songs and poetry and organizing workers and peasants against their exploiters wherever he went. He was an exceptionally talented exponent of the tradition of extemporaneous poetry and song in folk poetic meters, which at the time was strongly associated with the lower classes and disparaged by elites. Those elites who were beginning to broaden their outlook, like the poet Laxmiprasad Devkota, recognized in Joshi a talent rivalling their own, and many tried to get him into national politics. Yet Joshi had no patience for intellectual society, employment, political institutions, or the householder life, and preferred direct political action and the life of the road. Because of his ascetic-like lifestyle, his rejection of institutions, and the suppression of his works by his rivals, the details of his life are somewhat of a mystery and his works have been hard to find for decades. This has allowed a mythology to grow up around the figure of Gokul Joshi: the “true people’s singer,” a modernist ascetic dedicating his life to improving the lot of the people through poetry and song. In this presentation I look at how stories of Gokul Joshi’s life have influenced the careers of subsequent radical progressive performers, and how the idea of the “true people’s singer” has developed, in light of masculine traditions of Hindu asceticism, communist New Man theory, and changing political-economic conditions in Nepal. I address how the idea of the “true people’s singer” may have contributed to a constrained recognition of performers whose contributions did not fit that mold. I argue that Gokul Joshi may have created the role of the folk-style people’s singer in the drama of Nepali progressive politics, but that others now have the opportunity to expand it to newer ways of being revolutionary.

Dr. Stirr is Associate Professor in Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Anna’s research focuses on South Asia, particularly on Nepal and the Himalayan region. She is currently working on two projects that deal with love, intimacy, and politics in Nepal. The first looks at improvised dohori question-answer songs as culturally intimate, gendered expressions of ideas of nation and heritage, within a cycle of migration and media circulation that spans the globe. The second chronicles the history of Nepal’s politically oppositional “progressive song” from the 1960s to the present, with a focus on ideas of love, development, and communist thought as interrelated ways of imagining a better future. Articles from these projects have appeared in various journals and edited volumes. Anna also maintains an active research interest in the relationship between music, religion, politics and public culture in South Asia and the Himalayas. Along with teaching and researching about music, Anna is also active as a performer. After a bachelor’s degree in western classical flute performance, she has studied Hindustani classical bansuri flute with Steve Gorn and Jeevan Ale, and has learned the folk style of bansuri performance through musical interaction with many Nepali performers during her fieldwork. As a singer, she has studied the Hindustani classical tradition with Prabhu Raj Dhakal in Nepal and Ustad Mehboob Nadeem in London, and she learned Nepali folk and dohori song as she learned the flute styles, in the informal oral tradition. Her formal instruction in Nepali folk music has been with Khadga Bahadur Budha Magar on the madal drum, and she believes that knowledge of percussion provides a firm foundation for a broader grasp of any musical style. She is working on compiling and translating the Nepali folk music teaching materials created by her teachers as well as the late musicologist Subi Shah.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program supports college graduates conducting research or teaching in any field in more than 150 countries. Applications are due in the fall; students who wish to begin the program immediately after graduation are encouraged to start the process in their junior year.

United States citizens in any field of study are eligible.

Contact: fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu, https://einaudi.cornell.edu/fulbright-us-student-program

The migration studies minor is a university-wide, interdisciplinary undergraduate minor that prepares students to understand the historical and contemporary contexts and factors that drive international migration and shape migrant experiences around the globe. This minor draws on the rich course offerings found across the humanities and social sciences at Cornell, and is designed to draw students outside of their major fields and to extend their knowledge beyond a single country.

Contact: migration-minor@einaudi.cornell.edu,

Is the Einaudi Center's International Relations minor for you? Here's a chance to find out. Graduates go on to successful careers in fields like international law, economics, agriculture, trade, finance, journalism, education, and government service.

Contact: irm@einaudi.cornell.edu; https://einaudi.cornell.edu/academics/international-relations-minor

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program provides full funding for graduate and professional students conducting research or teaching in any field in more than 150 countries. Open to U.S. citizens only.

The Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program supports doctoral students conducting research in modern languages or area studies for six to 12 months. Open to U.S. citizens and permanent residents of the United States. Travel to Western European countries is not eligible.

Contact: fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu, https://einaudi.cornell.edu/fulbright-us-student-program

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program supports college graduates conducting research or teaching in any field in more than 150 countries. Applications are due in the fall; students who wish to begin the program immediately after graduation are encouraged to start the process in their junior year.

United States citizens in any field of study are eligible.

Contact: fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu, https://einaudi.cornell.edu/fulbright-us-student-program

Want to learn a language this summer? Learn about Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships and Critical Language Scholarships, which provide fully funded opportunities for Cornell undergraduate and graduate students to study South and Southeast Asian languages in the summer, and even in the academic year.

Please join us for a talk by Alexander Soucy (St. Mary's University).

In 2006, a monk and member of the Order of Interbeing wrote an open letter to the disciples of Thích Nhất Hạnh, in which he described his (and hence their) Zen lineage. One of the claims the letter made was that Thích Nhất Hạnh "received the lamp-transmission in Từ Hiếu root temple" ten days before he left for the US in 1966. This portrayal of Thích Nhất Hạnh as Zen master has been uncritically assumed and repeated in the media as well as in the scholarship of Buddhism in the West, mostly by uncritically affixing to him the title of "Zen Master." As Nguyen and Barber noted, however, this assertion of him being part of a Zen lineage is not based in the forms of Buddhist practice and temple organization that actually exist in Vietnam. This presentation will discuss the seeming incongruence between the claims by Thích Nhất Hạnh and his followers and the Buddhist practices and institutions in Vietnam. The purpose is not to disprove their claims, but contextualize the globally important figure of Thích Nhất Hạnh within the developments of Buddhism in Vietnam and with the globalization of Buddhism.

The Cornell Buddhist Studies Seminar Series is co-sponsored by the GPSA-FC, the Departments of Anthropology, Asian Studies and Philosophy, by the South Asia Program, and by the Society for the Humanities. The talk is open to all interested; for accessibility queries please contact buddhiststudies@cornell.edu

Talk by Syed Jaleel Hussain

The ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity has been an essential feature of life in Kashmir for centuries. The majority of the muslim population is Sunni along with sizeable pockets of Shia minority. Shias have played a critical role in the socio-political and cultural life of Kashmir. They were part of the valiant defiance of the Mughal designs in the Chak and post-Chak Kashmir, were involved with the resistance against Dogra oppression, and actively participated in the political struggle against Indian rule after 1947. The overall political posture of Shias regarding the essential elements of the resolution of Kashmir conflict is not starkly different from the majority Sunnis. For most part of the modern history Shias have supported the azadi movement towards a sovereign and independent Kashmir. However, after the 1980s, the Shia discourse about azadi and insurgency gradually turned ambivalent with the growing internal group contestation amongst Shias due to internal and external factors. The internal factors include the growing electoral competition and a rise in the incidents of sectarian violence in Kashmir. The political developments in Pakistan, Iran and the Arab world have become the external determinants of Shia thinking about the Kashmir issue.

Syed Jaleel Hussain is a Fulbright post-doctoral fellow at the South Asia Program, Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University. He is an Assistant Professor at Nelson Mandela Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. He is a University Gold Medalist, an ICSSR doctoral fellow, a recipient of UGC’s Senior Research Fellowship and Gandhi Smriti Fellowship for Masters Programme. His research articles have been published in national and international peer reviewed journals like the Journal of Asian Security and International Affairs, Journal of Defence Studies, Economic & Political Weekly and South Asian Journal of Diplomacy. His op-ed articles have appeared in Indian English dailies like the Indian Express, the Sunday Guardian, Afghan Zariza, Greater Kashmir and others. He has previously been associated with Delhi Policy Group, a think tank based in Delhi. His primary research interests are in the areas of culture and strategy, global nuclear issues, ethnic conflicts and issues of conflict & security in South Asia and West Asia.